Sally
Rand and Yesterday's ‘House of Tomorrow’

by
Clay Coppedge

News
that Sally Rand would come to Texas for the Forth Worth Frontier Centennial in
1936 was met with outrage by some and curiosity by many. Her reputation, gained
at the 1933 World Fair in Chicago in 1933, preceded her.

Sally Rand was
a burlesque dancer who hated the term stripper when it was applied to her. In
Chicago, she had been arrested four times in a single day because of a Lady Godiva
act that she pulled on the streets of that city to bring attention to the Sally
Rand Nude Ranch at the fair. The charges were dropped because authorities could
not actually prove that she was nude, and she insisted she was not. Perhaps coincidentally
and perhaps not, the Chicago World’s Fair was one of the few that actually showed
a profit.

Sally
Rand's Nude Ranch Photo Courtesy Amber Di Giovanni

Though she had no
way of knowing it, Rand became part of the not-always friendly rivalry between
Fort Worth and its neighbor, Dallas,
which was staging its own centennial, an edifying affair. Amon Carter,
the Forth Worth publisher and booster, decided to go another route with his city’s
celebration. “Go Elsewhere For Education, Come to Fort Worth For Entertainment”
read the billboards, thousands of them, spread over several states. Aside from
the slogan, the billboards showed scantily clad young women cavorting about in
a Western setting. Among the people so intrigued by the billboards to change a
road trip itinerary was Ernest Hemingway, who decided to go to Memphis
from Idaho via Fort Worth after
seeing the billboards.

The centerpiece of the Fort Worth Exposition was
the revue Casa Mañana, (House of Tomorrow) which was directed by Broadway’s
Billy Rose at a time when he was most famous for being married to Ziegfeld
comedy and music star Fanny Brice.

The idea of bringing Sally Rand
to Fort Worth began with Billy
Rose denouncing her during an impromptu press conference announcing his involvement
in Casa Mañana. Rose promised that his show would have “neither nudity
or smut” and added, “we don’t need any fans or bubble dances at the Texas Frontier
Celebration.”

Later, Carter asked Rose what he was talking about and Rose
told him about Sally Rand’s fan dance and bubble dance, which she had performed
at the World’s Fair. Carter asked if the show drew a lot of people and Rose assured
him that it did. That’s when Amon Carter decided that Texas
needed Sally Rand to help celebrate its heritage.

Born
Harriet Helen Gould Beck in Missouri in 1904, the girl who grew up to be
Sally Rand was one of those kids who dreams of running away to join the circus
and actually did so. For a time she went under the name Billie Beck but Cecil
B. DeMille, inspired by a Rand McNally atlas, had her change it to Sally Rand.

In the book Amon: The Texan Who Played Cowboy For America, author Jerry
Flemmons describes the scene at Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch this way: “Each girl wore
boots and hat, a green bandana, skirtlet, tights, and the brand ‘SR’ rubber-stamped
on each fleshy thigh. The ‘show’ consisted of girls lounging on swings and beach
chairs. Some played with a beach ball. Others shot bows and arrows. One or two
sat on horses.”

Sally performed a “Ballet Divertissement” in Casa Mañana,
alternating between balloons and fans for a certain amount of discretion. She
always said, “The Rand is quicker than the eye” in explaining how she managed
to keep audiences from seeing anything she didn’t want seen.

Reviews of Casa
Mañana in the national press sometimes bordered on the ecstatic. Damon Runyon
wrote, “Broadway and the Wild West are jointly producing what probably is the
biggest and most original show ever seen in the United States. If you took the
Polo Grounds and converted it into a café and then added the best Ziegfeld scenic
effects, you might get something approximating Casa Mañana.”

Nearly
all of the press coverage mentioned or featured Sally Rand. Flemmons reported
that of the 17,000 stories written for newspapers around the country, half featured
Sally Rand. In one 90-day period, her picture appeared in Texas newspapers 947
times.

The local publicity turned positive as Rand threw out ceremonial
first pitches, spoke to service clubs and PTA meetings, bought memberships for
the civic music season, traveled on behalf of Fort
Worth’s centennial celebration and even gave a pep talk to the TCU football
team.

The city of Fort Worth
declared November 6, 1936 as “Sally Rand Day” where she was lauded for her “graciousness
and consummate artistry” and officially thanked for bringing “culture and progress
to the city.”

The city could afford to be nice to everybody associated
with the celebration because it was wildly popular. “For what it was and where
it was, Fort Worth’s Frontier
Centennial, especially Casa Mañana, perhaps was the most successful exposition
of its type in history,” Flemmons wrote.

Three years later, Runyon still
seemed to be pining for the Fort Worth
extravaganza. He summed up the 1939 New York World’s Fair with, “No runs, no hits,
no Carters.”